


Date Night

by quadrotriticale



Category: Star Trek, Star Trek: Voyager
Genre: F/M, Holodecks/Holosuites, POV Second Person, POV Tom Paris, Suicidal Thoughts, gratuitous use of 70s/80s songs, help i love b'elanna torres, its ok tho its mentioned in passing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-07
Updated: 2018-07-07
Packaged: 2019-06-06 13:38:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,201
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15195935
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/quadrotriticale/pseuds/quadrotriticale
Summary: “I don’t think the captain would be too happy with you if you started picking fights in Engineering again, B.” She laughs at that, and you grin.“Doesn’t matter if she’s happy or not, she’s got no one to replace me. And I’m not Starfleet, she’s got nothing on me.”You snort, tip your head to the side to look at her. “Yeah, ‘til she takes you into her ready room and lectures you like you’re five.”“Touché.”





	Date Night

**Author's Note:**

> danny writes useless fluff dot jpeg  
> anyway welcome to i have so many feelings about voyager  
> i only partially proofed this im tired and its bed time so fuck it i guess  
> oh my god i had this tagged as major character death for a second there im so sorry. NO ONE DIES. THIS IS FLUFF.

Of course, you’re used to seeing nothing but slow moving stars out the view ports, and you’re used to the feeling of artificial gravity, and you’re used to everything that comes with living on a starship. You’re used to it, but that doesn’t make the lack of “fresh air” and green and _home_ anymore jarring. You aren’t even on a ship built for deep space missions. It doesn’t come with green-space and you wouldn’t exactly call the make-shift aeroponics bay welcoming. It’s just as sterile as the rest of the ship, only someone decided to bullshit a garden on a couple of special shelves. You guess the holodecks help with the homesickness a little bit, but they’re holographic, they're artificial, and you’re acutely aware of the fact that everything contained in them is fake no matter how real any of it pretends to be. Stopping off on planets is nice too, you guess but it’s not home, it’s not Earth. Something’s always wrong, whether it’s the sky or the smell or the consistency of the water. You never thought you’d miss the shit rock you were born on as much as you do, but you suppose that’s what happens when something you take for granted is stolen from you. 

On ships actually built for deep space, ships actually built to hold families and spend the years away from Earth and sometimes out of proper communications range that those exploratory missions tend to, the colors are different. The ship looks more earthy, is lit with lights that more closely mimic sunlight, has some sort of green-space, some kind of arboretum for people feeling homesick. (There’s also more holodecks.) Even on those ships, those huge, Galaxy class starships, people can go a little stir crazy, and there’s documented research into mental health repercussions of extended stays in deep space. You know, you haven't had much to do in your off hours besides peruse Voyager's computers and contemplate why the hell you're even bothering with this. You've read them all, or at least every one you could find that was published before the ship got catapulted halfway across the galaxy, you know what's up. 

On your ship, on Voyager, it always feels like you’re indoors because Voyager is Intrepid class, the design team wouldn't have considered the possibility of a deep space mission, there wasn’t supposed to ever be one. Voyager was never supposed to get more than two weeks away from the nearest starbase, let alone stranded 75000 light years from Earth in the goddamn fucking Delta quadrant. You can practically feel the way it weighs on the crew. The depression in the air is practically tangible, like you could hold it in your hands if you wanted to, and you’re sort of amazed that no one’s bothered to off themselves yet. You’re sure people have tried though, you mean, you’ve been pretty close. 

No one ever mentions the atmosphere or their homesickness, and no one ever mentions the fact that the ship is constantly falling apart, and no one ever mentions how you’ll all be lucky to ever set foot in federation space ever again, let alone return home to whatever planet or colony or moon anybody happens to be from. You think if these things were open topics of discussion among the crew, nothing would ever get done, and all one-hundred-and-forty-something of you would be even more fucked than you currently are. 

All of that said, it’s your day off, and you’re spending all your free time in Holodeck 1. You booked out the day about a month ago, and you’re taking full advantage of it. If you can’t go home right now, you figure the best you can do is lock yourself in a holographic environment of your own creation and spend about a dozen hours building and fixing cars that aren’t even real. Something in the back of your mind reminds you that you were supposed to meet your girlfriend for a date tonight, but you push it away. You don’t have the energy for that right now, need some time to yourself away from the rest of the crew right now, so you can’t exactly be bothered. You know she'll get it.

You fix a few of your cars, spend some time washing them, spend longer still just staring off into space contemplating existence and passively wanting to kill yourself. You take a drive at some point, catch the program bugging out once or twice as the world loads around you. You like cars, which is why you have this program. Specifically, you like cars from old Earth, when the fuel they used pumped toxic gas into the air and threatened to overheat the planet. The cars were small, dangerous, hunks of metal and canvas that, at least to you, offer an escape you haven't ever really been able to find anywhere else. You like the rumble of the old engines, you like the grimy feeling you get after working on one for hours just because it makes you feel like you’ve done something, and you like how you can pump music through the stereo and, in your own little world locked inside a steel death trap, no one can tell you to shut it off because no one else can hear it. 

You drive for an amount of time you aren’t totally sure about. You’re pretty far out of your head through most of it, but you think that’s alright. The holodeck safeties are on, you can’t really hurt yourself here, even if you want to. (You’d like to turn them off, you would, but someone locked you out, and you could work your way through all the locks if you felt like it, but you don’t bother.) If your attention drifts, the car rights itself and continues on the way you were going like you never lost control. It's a little frustrating, sometimes, but like most of the things that threaten to break your illusion, you try to ignore it.

It’s 2100 hours when B’Elanna comes in, and you only know that because she tells you. She doesn’t sound nearly as bothered as you expect her to be when she finds you sitting on the hood of one of your cars looking up at the holographic sky. She tells you you missed your date, and you tell her you just lost track of time and you’re sorry. (You know she knows you’re lying; you still have an hour and a half of holodeck time booked out, but she doesn’t mention it and she doesn’t act like she’s upset) She sets herself beside you, crosses her legs and looks up at the stars. It’s not real, the car isn’t real and the breeze isn’t real and you can tell, you could probably tell even if you didn’t already know it was artificial, but it still manages to be a comfort. You lean back against the windshield and don’t say much. She crosses her legs, and doesn’t press you for information. The air smells like grass and gasoline and you try to pretend that the ripples of the fields in front of you are real. It almost feels like it is, for a time. 

“Why do you come here?” she asks you eventually, voice quiet like she’s trying not to disturb the scene. Behind the gentle background noises of the holodeck program, you can hear the ship creak. 

“I don’t know,” you tell her truthfully. “I guess it’s not anywhere I’ve ever been, I mean, I built this program to be 20th century Earth, but I didn’t really have anywhere in mind. I could drive all three days down the road and never find a city, I just built the cottage and the garage and somewhere for me to drive. I don’t know.” 

“You’re always here, though,” she replies, looking back at you. Her back is hunched, and her shoulders sag, and you wonder what she did today. “And I mean, here, every time I come in here and you’re running this program, you’re here.” 

“Oh, huh. Didn’t notice.” You shrug. “I guess I just like the view.”

B’Elanna leans back against the windshield, and you lapse into silence again. Your artificial world cycles through artificial skies, and the mechanical woman’s voice pipes up to tell you you have half an hour left in the holodeck before anyone says anything else. 

“Impulse engines blew out today,” she tells you conversationally. You can hear the exhaustion in her voice no matter how hard she tries to mask it. 

“Again?” you respond, amusement pretty obvious in your voice. “I thought I felt a lurch. How’d it happen this time?”

“I have no fucking clue,” she replies, accompanying hand motion exaggerated. You lean your head back against the car and giggle. You can’t see her face, but you can hear the smile in her voice when she speaks again, layered over exasperation. “One second, I was running diagnostics, next thing I know, one of the impulse reactors is on fire. No one could tell me what the hell had happened. Just about punched Ensign Ashmore’s damn lights out.”

“I don’t think the captain would be too happy with you if you started picking fights in Engineering again, B.” She laughs at that, and you grin. 

“Doesn’t matter if she’s happy or not, she’s got no one to replace me. And I’m not Starfleet, she’s got nothing on me.”

You snort, tip your head to the side to look at her. “Yeah, ‘til she takes you into her ready room and lectures you like you’re five.”

“Touché.”

For a few minutes, you just watch the stars. 

“Twenty minutes remaining,” says the computer. You sigh. 

“Aaaalright. Okay, I need to take this back to the garage so it saves right,” you tell her, slipping off the hood of the car. “Care to join me?”

She grins at you, slips off the other side of the hood, goes to the door. “Of course.” 

You pop open the door to the drivers side, settle into your seat, pop your key into the transmission as B’Elanna shuts her door. The engine revs to life, and you peel out of your makeshift parking spot. 

“How far out did you drive, anyway?” she asks as you fiddle with the radio. 

“Couple hours,” you tell her with a shrug. “Doesn’t matter, could be twenty minutes if I wanted it to be. I built this, I’m God here.”

“Obviously.”

You shuffle through your programmed stations before you give up, decide there’s nothing decent on any of those tonight. “Computer,” you start. The computer beeps acknowledgement at you. “Play… uh, play playlist Paris Twelve, car speakers.” The computer beeps again, and music filters in through the car. B’Elanna laughs at you. You’ve played this fucking song enough that you know she recognizes the opening rift.

“ _A little ditty ‘bout Jack and Diane_ \- Come on, B, come on! Sing with me,” you start, continuing while she refuses through her laughter. “ _Two American kids growing up in the heartland_ \- Come on!” you elbow her for emphasis. The steering wheel beneath your hand adjusts itself when you take your attention off the road and you try to ignore it. 

“Fine! Fine,” she says, giggling over the music. You cheer, let the music go on for a beat before you pick it up again. It goes another line before she joins, and you know the grin on your face is stupid. She sings the rest of the song with you, grows louder and more into it the longer it goes on. When it fades out, you look over at her about as seriously as you can manage. 

“Next ones a good one-” the opening rift starts, so you raise your voice a little, “don’t bail on me now!” She laughs. 

“ _Somebody’s gonna hurt someone,_ ” you notice immediately that she’s singing along with you, almost as loud as you are, and most of you wants to lean across the car and kiss her stupid. You settle for belting some of your favorite songs in a holographic car. 

Over your music, you don’t hear the computer’s ten minute warning, don’t hear it’s five minute warning, only know you’re out of time because you’ve cycled through four songs and you’re pulling into the driveway, into the garage, and you want to stay another three hours just to see the way she gets into the music, just to see her look happy. You park your car, call for an exit and for the program to be saved and ended just as the computer starts a ten second countdown. Your little world disappears, and you follow B’Elanna out.

She tells you sometime later, when you’ve both showered and you’ve asked the replicator for a bowl of microwaved ramen, that she actually enjoyed your 'date', if you can call it that. You tell her that you’re pretty sure that was better than any actual date either of you have ever had. She doesn’t disagree. 

You suggest that you should do that for date night more often.

“No,” she says, “You’re gonna make me listen to Uptown Girl again.”

(She’s not wrong.)


End file.
